videogames

Hello there, and welcome to the site of Mike Brannan. I hope you enjoy your stay.

This site is a place to present myself professionally to the world at large and document my progress as I seek to reenter the world of professional game development.

First off, a little about me:

As I write this, I am an unemployed ex-game developer with a little over two years of professional experience as a designer. I have been out of the industry for about two years as I recovered from a heavy bout of depression, coupled with a brief stint with substance abuse. I’ve been working small-time oddjobs since my time with Griptonite Games (now Glu-Kirkland), and generally languished under the unfortunate reality of not having an online portfolio to show prospective employers. This post here is really my first step towards fixing that issue and getting myself back on my feet doing the work I dreamed of so passionately growing up and trained so hard for during my time at the Guildhall at SMU. Why it has taken me so long to take this step, I cannot say, as I myself do not know, but suffice to say that it is long overdue.

In the days and weeks to come I will seek to put together examples of the work I produced while at Griptonite, which includes a significant portion of the playable content for two released console games and the menu systems for a free-to-play mobile game. Because I am now nearly two years out of practice, I also hope to document the steps I take to retrain myself in the skills I have the most experience in: level design and scripting.

However, the real goal for my career is to develop myself as a narrative designer. I believe the interactive medium of videogames has incredible potential as a vehicle for presenting new themes, ideas, and messages to its audience. Games as Narrative is an incredibly exciting field that has been emerging over the past decade or so, and I would love to be able to contribute to the ongoing discourse.

So, there you have it. In brief, who I am and what I’m hoping to do with this little WordPress site. Hopefully things here will grow well, take off, and end up with me back behind a desk in front of an editor and making something fun and interesting. Thank you much for taking the time to read this, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day!